Summa: diary (January 3-9, 2026)
Please, be patient; the words will come to me.
January 3 (Saturday).
6.00 am: ‘Moontide’, while the town still slumbered:
9.15 am: The pink-tinted sky of the after-dawn gave way to a sulfurous yellow. Snow fell as I walked into town and, with it, a dampening silence.
Out from the Irish Sea, a rainbow seemed to emerge. (I remembered John Constable’s seascapes.) The promissory.
January 4 (Sunday). 7.00 am: The first fall: snow, stillness, and silence. The whitened roofs and roads transformed the townscape into something resembling the linear drawings I made in the 1990s. Then, I lived in a house on the hillside at the right of the picture (below).
1.30 pm: At the cemetery, the morning’s fall still covered the cold marble slaps of the graves — ‘crisp and even’ — like well-ironed white linen, stretched upon beds. Whenever I walk a through a cemetery either during or after snowfall, I recall the last paragraph of James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’. I’m struck by every line, but this one in particular: ‘He heard the snow falling faintly’. It suggests a sound so close to absolute silence as to be almost indistinguishable from it. The party mentioned in the story is a celebration of Twelfth Night and Epiphany, on January 5 and 6, respectively. The snowfall is a metaphor for the narrator’s (Gabriel’s) lament that he’d not loved a woman passionately, for the recognition of his own mortality, and for death itself — which, like the snow, descends upon everyone, whether dead or alive.
It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead (James Joyce, ‘The Dead’ (1914).)
January 5 (Monday). Twelfth Night. 6.30 am: The second fall maintained a steady descent for the next few hours — ‘falling faintly through the universe’. A softer, quieter, and more consoling landscape began to take form before my eyes, in slow time.
8.30 am: A WiFi failure on the domestic network was an irritating distraction as I returned to work. While I turned over possible solutions in the annex of my mind, my primary energies were focused upon a review of the Aberfan project and its components. As I move towards September, the sprawling whole must resolve and coalesce. My thoughts turned to the accompanying website, and the substantial text that needs to be included.
2.00 pm: Once the tree is debaubled and cast out of the front room window into the nether garden, and Christmas lights and decorations boxed for another year, the house returns to normality — as though it had woken from a long and satisfying dream. To add to today’s domestic network problem, a raft of servers (somewhere on earth) had developed ‘issues’ (as they say). Are the two dysfunctions connected? Is the snow to blame? Are they the type of problems that will resolve themselves in time, without my intervention? 4.00 pm: Yes. they were. In the evening, I pointed, self-righteously, at houses in the neighbourhood that hadn’t yet taken down their Christmas decorations.
January 6 (Tuesday). Epiphany. 5.30 am: At the close of an early-morning dream, I returned to a city. Buildings on the High Street shook violently. Black and white clouds of dust and debris fell onto the pavement and road. I saw in the far distance the darkened facade of a Victorian-gothic church. But the dream was without sound — as though I was watching a silent movie.
I didn’t want to begin the phase 3 pass over the tracks comprising the Darkness Covered the Whole Land: sixteen sound postcards of Aberfan album. My determination, today, was to compose responses to ten victims’ names for the 144 Variations on a Theme by Joseph Parry for the Victims of Aberfan album. A greater distance is required before I can conclude the former. To begin, then: ‘Karen O’Brien’. In the background, I began to familiarise myself a recent acquisition: my first integrated synthesizer. Up until now, the oscillators and modulating filters comprising a synthesizer have been, in my system of operations, separate, cable-linked, and interchangeable. They’re used to either generate and manipulate frequencies or modify an external input, such as a found sound. 7.30 pm: Correspondence with friends afar off.
January 7 (Wednesday).
‘We treasure most what we cannot have.’
8.00 am: A little packing in readiness for a trip to South Wales tomorrow. 9.00 am: Studyology. Writing. There comes at time in the life-cycle of a project when I’m conscious of letting go (willingly). In parallel, a rather uncomfortable sense of familiarity begins to surface. It signals the close of the peak creative and conceptualising process. From here-on-in, the emphasis is upon framing, positioning, polishing, describing, and designing the outputs and their containers. After which, the project will go public and be exorcised from my mind and soul. Once it’s concluded, part of me will no longer wants anything to do with the endeavour. Another part realises that the task of promotion and exposition has only just begun.
11.30 am: Studiology. I returned to the 144 Variations, feeling too eager to complete the album and move on.
January 8 (Thursday). 9.00 am: The prospect of Storm Goretti bearing down on Wales and England this afternoon, put pay to my journey to Cardiff, following a visit (in the moderate rain) to the hospital at Carmarthen in the morning. It’s variously referred to as West Wales Hospital (on old road signs), Carmarthen General Hospital (locally), and Glangwili Hospital (formerly).
While in the waiting room, young and old on crutches and in wheel chairs, and with chronic and painful disabilities, passed haltingly from one side to the other. My deficits are frustrating, but they’ve yet to either slow my progress through this world, or prevent me doing what must be done, or kill me. Thus, I’m grateful for what I have, and don’t have, to suffer. As patients were summoned to their appointments, I looked up to see whether the faces matched the names. The anxiety that permeated the room was alleviated, somewhat, by the comforting smell of fresh coffee coming from the cafe at the entrance to Outpatients.
I was here to discuss my latest MRI scan with an Ears, Nose, and Throat consultant, for the final time (hopefully). Nothing amiss, on this occasion. (Well I shan’t be needing a brain transplant, then. In any case, I suspect that they no longer make replacement parts for such an old model.) ‘I am fearfully and wonderfully made’. The symmetry of the skull’s interior is striking – reminiscent of a Rorschach blot. MRI images have a curiously etched and painterly quality too. Hidden within this mirror landscape of caverns, estuaries, archipelagos, and mazes are my thoughts and sense of being.
1.30 pm: I headed for home via Aberaeron — where I ate lunch and bought provisions — before the rain became more insistent.
January 9 (Friday). 7.00 am: Not a flake of snow to be seen anywhere. Elsewhere in the county, there’d been a significant fall. All trains between Aberystwyth and Birmingham International were cancelled.
4.00 pm: After work, an ambulation. The translucent clouds illuminated by the parting light, rose up from above the horizon — tall and shear — like the face of El Capitan. World-upon-world. Out at sea, they poured down misty veils of rain upon no one.
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice